Shipping from Vietnam to USA

Top Origin Ports:

Ho Chi Minh (Cat Lai), Hai Phong

Top Destination Ports:

Los Angeles, Long Beach, Houston, New York

Which air service to ask for

• Standard airport-to-airport: cargo tendered to a scheduled service and charged on chargeable weight. The usual choice for pallets and larger consignments.
• Consolidated air freight: smaller shipments grouped under one master air waybill, which lowers the per-kilo cost when a full pallet is not justified.
• Door-to-door air: factory pickup in Vietnam, the air leg, the US customs entry through a licensed broker and delivery to your warehouse under one booking.
• Buyer’s consolidation at origin: Airlift’s Ho Chi Minh City office can collect from several factories and tender one shipment, on air as it does on ocean.
• Sea-air and expedited ocean: where the deadline is tight but not urgent enough to justify a full air rate, ask for a comparison against the fastest direct West Coast sailings before booking.

Documents and compliance on the air leg

• Air waybill, commercial invoice and packing list, with the HS code verified before tender and a certificate of origin where the buyer asks for one.
• No ISF: the Importer Security Filing applies to ocean cargo only. Air shipments are covered by advance air cargo data filed by the carrier or forwarder instead.
• Product-specific filings still apply — FCC for radio-frequency devices, a CPSC Children’s Product Certificate for children’s products, and FDA for food and cosmetics.
• Tariffs follow the goods, not the mode: the Section 301 forced-labour duty and any other measure in force apply to an air shipment exactly as they would to the same goods in a container.

Top 4 (by container volume):

• Furniture and home goods
• Textiles and garments
• Footwear
• Electronics

Additional Commodities Handled:

Household appliances, packaging materials, retail inventory.

At origin – Vietnam

• Export declaration lodged electronically through VNACCS/VCIS, Vietnam Customs’ automated clearance system, which assigns the declaration to a green, yellow or red channel (release, document check or physical inspection) before the container can gate in.
• Commercial invoice and packing list; the invoice value, description and HS code must match what is declared to US customs, because the two declarations are compared when origin is questioned.
• Certificate of origin: the United States has no free trade agreement with Vietnam (the 2001 Bilateral Trade Agreement provides normal trade relations, not preferential tariffs), so no preferential certificate reduces US duty. A non-preferential certificate of origin is still worth holding as evidence of where the goods were made.
• Wood packaging must be ISPM 15 treated and marked; untreated pallets and crates are refused at the US port.

At destination – USA

• ISF (Importer Security Filing) at least 24 hours before the container is loaded in Vietnam; late or inaccurate filings can draw liquidated damages of up to $5,000 per filing.
• Customs entry with a bond: a continuous bond covers a year of entries and ISF filings, a single-transaction bond covers one entry (and, separately, one ISF).
• Product-specific requirements still apply: FCC for radio-frequency devices such as phones, routers and headphones, a CPSC Children’s Product Certificate for toys and children’s products, Lacey Act declarations for wood furniture and plant products, and FDA prior notice for food such as cashews and coffee.

Duties on goods from Vietnam (September 2026)

• Column 1 duty: the normal HTS rate for the product. Most electronics lines are free; footwear and apparel carry double-digit rates, which is why a running shoe from Vietnam can owe more duty than a laptop.
• Section 301 forced-labour duty: from 24 July 2026 an additional 12.5% applies to products of Vietnam, which is in the higher of the two tiers (10% for economies such as India, Japan and the EU). It is reported ahead of the other Chapter 99 lines, and goods already covered by Section 232 are exempt from it.
• Section 232 duties where the product is covered: upholstered wooden furniture and kitchen cabinets and vanities (25% since 14 October 2025, with increases deferred to 1 January 2027), steel, aluminium and copper articles and their derivatives (assessed on full customs value since 6 April 2026, with metal furniture and shelving under heading 9403 added on 8 June 2026), a narrow band of advanced semiconductors (25% since 15 January 2026) and drones and drone components (100% or 25% since 3 September 2026).
• Antidumping and countervailing duties: crystalline silicon solar cells and modules from Vietnam (AD and CVD orders effective 24 June 2025), corrosion-resistant steel from Vietnam (AD and CVD orders effective 19 December 2025) and mattresses from Vietnam (AD order in force since 14 May 2021, continued after its 2026 sunset review) sit under case-specific rates. Hardwood plywood completed in Vietnam from Chinese veneers or cores was found in July 2023 to be circumventing the China orders, so those entries need the exporter certification on file.
• IEEPA tariffs no longer apply: the Supreme Court held on 20 February 2026 that IEEPA does not authorise tariffs, collection stopped on 24 February 2026, and refunds of IEEPA duties paid since February 2025 are being processed through ACE. The 10% Section 122 surcharge that replaced them expired on 24 July 2026.
• Duties are assessed on the customs value of the goods, not on the freight, and the merchandise processing fee and harbor maintenance fee are added at entry.

Origin, transshipment and forced-labour scrutiny

• Country of origin follows substantial transformation, not the port of loading. Goods that are only assembled, packed or lightly finished in Vietnam from Chinese components keep Chinese origin in CBP’s eyes and are treated as transshipment if entered as Vietnamese; complex manufacturing in Vietnam does confer Vietnamese origin. Hold a bill of materials by country and a description of the process steps performed in Vietnam, and ask for a CBP binding ruling where the answer is not obvious.
• The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act applies wherever the goods were finished: CBP presumes that goods made wholly or in part with Xinjiang inputs, or by an entity on the UFLPA Entity List, are made with forced labour and detains them until the importer proves otherwise. Cotton, polysilicon and tomatoes are the priority sectors, so apparel, footwear and solar from Vietnam draw the most scrutiny.
• CBP’s June 2026 forced-labour guidance sets out what a rebuttal needs: purchase orders, invoices, bills of materials, production and transportation records, supplier attestations and sub-tier supplier documentation, translated and indexed. Map your supplier’s inputs before booking; a detention can hold a container for weeks while evidence is assembled after the fact.

Full container load (FCL)

• Equipment: 20′ standard (about 33 m³ of usable space), 40′ standard (about 67 m³) and 40′ high cube (about 76 m³), plus open-top and flat-rack equipment for out-of-gauge cargo.
• The container is loaded and sealed at your supplier’s factory or a container freight station, moves under one bill of lading and is delivered intact to your door; no other shipper’s cargo touches it.
• Volume, not weight, usually decides the box on this lane: furniture, mattresses, footwear and garments fill a 40′ high cube long before it reaches a road weight limit, so one high cube normally beats two 20′ containers on cost per piece.
• Cut-offs: the booking confirmation carries the document, verified gross mass (VGM) and gate-in cut-offs at Cat Lai or Hai Phong; a missed cut-off rolls the container to the next sailing, and the cut-off for a Cai Mep mainline call comes earlier than the vessel date because of the barge leg.

Less than container load (LCL)

• Your cartons or pallets are received at a container freight station (CFS) in Ho Chi Minh City or Hai Phong, consolidated with other shippers’ cargo, and deconsolidated at a CFS near the US port before delivery.
• LCL is charged on weight or measure — per cubic metre or per 1,000 kg, whichever is greater — plus origin and destination CFS handling.
• The ocean transit is the same as FCL on the same service, but consolidation at origin and deconsolidation at destination add days, so door-to-door takes longer than a container of your own.
• Packaging matters more than in FCL because the cargo is handled several times: palletise, shrink-wrap and mark every piece, and use ISPM 15 treated pallets.

How to choose

• Below roughly 13 m³, LCL is usually cheaper. Between about 13 and 20 m³ ask for both, because a 20′ container often costs little more than the equivalent LCL once CFS charges are added. Above 20 m³ FCL usually wins on cost, handling and transit.
• Buying from several factories in the same region? Buyer’s consolidation at Airlift’s Ho Chi Minh City CFS turns three LCL shipments into one FCL container and one customs entry.
• Time-critical or fragile goods favour FCL even at small volumes, because the container is sealed at origin and opened at your door.
• Very small shipments — a few cartons — can be cheaper by air once LCL minimums and CFS charges are counted; the air section above explains how chargeable weight is calculated.

What the destination leg involves

• Drayage: a truck and chassis move the container from the terminal or rail ramp to your door, and the empty is returned to the depot.
• Free time: terminals and rail ramps allow a few days to collect the container before demurrage starts, and carriers allow a few days to return the empty before detention applies. Both are billed per day, so book the delivery appointment before the vessel arrives.
• Transloading: for retail distribution, containers can be stripped at a warehouse near the port and reloaded into domestic trailers, which suits multi-stop deliveries and Amazon or retailer routing rules — common for furniture and footwear programmes.
• Delivery appointments, liftgate service and residential delivery are extra services; state them at quote time so they are priced in.

Shipping company, carrier, forwarder or NVOCC?

• Ocean carriers (shipping lines) own or charter the vessels and set their own rates and schedules. Vietnam is served both by direct transpacific strings — CMA CGM’s Mekong Transpacific Express, launched in May 2026, calls Hai Phong and Vung Tau (Cai Mep) direct to Los Angeles and Oakland — and by Asia–US services that call Hai Phong or Cai Mep and continue through Chinese ports or a Southeast Asian hub, such as CMA CGM’s PEARL string from Port Klang through Hai Phong and Yantian to Los Angeles. The routing, not the carrier name, is what sets your transit.
• An NVOCC (non-vessel operating common carrier) buys space from those lines, issues its own house bill of lading and is licensed and bonded by the FMC. Airlift USA is an NVOCC, so the rates in its rate search are its own carrier rates, not a referral.
• A freight forwarder arranges the whole move around the ocean leg: pickup, export clearance, ISF, the US customs entry and delivery. Most importers want a forwarder that is also an NVOCC, so one company is accountable for the bill of lading and the service around it.

What to check before you choose a forwarder:

• FMC licence and NVOCC bond, so the forwarder can issue its own bills of lading.
• Own staff at both ends of the lane rather than an agent at one end — it decides who answers when a factory misses a cargo-ready date.
• Buyer’s consolidation capability if you buy from several Vietnamese suppliers into one container.
• Both ocean and air capability on the lane, so a delayed order can switch modes without changing forwarder.
• ISF filing record: late or inaccurate filings can draw CBP liquidated damages of up to $5,000 per filing.
• US customs handled through licensed brokers, with HTS classification, origin review and duty estimates available before you book.
• Live tracking and document access rather than emailed status updates.